Photograph Your Schedule, Get Your Classes: Smarter Schedule Import

TeacherTree

Setting up a teaching schedule has always had the same tax: you already have the information, and you still have to type it in. TeacherTree could already read a single screenshot. Today it can read the schedule as it actually exists in your life — several screenshots at once, or a photo of the printed timetable taped to the studio wall.

Three things changed, and the third is the one that matters most.

1. Pick as many images as you need

Almost no teacher's week fits in one screenshot. It's Monday through Wednesday in one studio's app, Thursday through Sunday in another, and a graphic from the place you sub at.

Now you select them all at once — up to eight — and they come back as one list. If two screenshots overlap, the class that appears in both shows up once. If one image can't be read, the others still come through, and we tell you which one failed instead of quietly dropping it.

2. Photograph the schedule on the wall

Plenty of studios still run on a printed grid by the door or a spreadsheet open on the front-desk computer. There's no screenshot to take, so there's a Take a photo option that opens your camera directly.

Photos of paper and screens are harder to read than screenshots, so the reader was built for them specifically: angled shots, glare, the moiré pattern you get photographing a monitor, and handwritten corrections over printed text — where the handwriting is treated as the correction, because it is.

Getting a good read

• Stand square to the schedule rather than off to one side.
• Get the whole week in frame; two overlapping photos beat one distant one.
• Turn the flash off — glare erases more text than dim light does.

3. It figures out which classes are yours

This is the real unlock. A studio timetable lists every teacher on the roster. Reading it and handing you forty classes isn't help — deleting thirty-four of them by hand is slower than typing your six from scratch.

So the import now reads the instructor name printed on each class and works out which ones are yours. Schedules abbreviate names in every way imaginable, and it handles them:

You don't type your name, pick yourself from a dropdown, or confirm who you are. It uses what your account already knows.

When it isn't sure, it says so instead of guessing. If two teachers named Taylor teach at your studio, a class marked just "Taylor" doesn't get claimed silently — it's flagged for you to decide. And every class belonging to someone else stays one tap away under "other teachers," so if you're covering a class printed under another name, you claim it and it's yours.

4. It won't add the same class twice

The quiet one. Most teachers importing a schedule already have most of it saved — they're updating, not starting over. Import used to mean duplicates.

Now every class read from your photos is checked against what you already have, and you get one line before anything is saved:

8 already on your schedule · 2 changed · 2 new

The two that changed show you exactly what moved — 6:00pm → 6:30pm, Sunroom → Studio B — so a class that shifted gets updated, not duplicated. Everything that's already right is counted and left alone. You confirm, and only the real difference is written.

About the other teachers on that schedule

A studio timetable is full of other people's names. They're used to find yours and nothing else: they're never saved to your account, never written to our logs, and they're gone the moment you close the import. The photos themselves are read once and never stored.

Frequently asked questions

Can I import a schedule that lists every teacher at the studio? Yes — that's the main case it's built for. It finds your classes, ignores everyone else's, and keeps theirs one tap away in case one of them is actually yours to cover.

What if it gets a class wrong? Every row is editable before you confirm, and nothing is saved until you do. Rows that were hard to read are flagged so you know where to look.

Will importing twice duplicate my schedule? No. A second import reports what you already have and only offers what's genuinely new or changed.

Does it work with a photo of a printed schedule? Yes — that's what the camera option is for. Photos of paper and monitors are handled specifically, including glare and angle.

Can I import from more than one studio? Yes. Select screenshots from each, or photograph each one, and they merge into a single weekly schedule.

Where this fits

Getting the schedule in was always the slowest part of putting yourself online. The point of removing it isn't the minutes saved — it's that a schedule that's easy to update stays accurate, and an accurate schedule is the only kind worth sharing. Once it's in, your shareable schedule link and your weekly graphics come from the same source, so updating one updates everything.

And once students are showing up, the thing that brings them back is the class itself. Our sister site CueCraftYoga writes about cueing and class craft for exactly that.

Ready to try it? Create your free schedule — photograph what you've got, and you're most of the way there.